HP Rolls Out Its First 3PAR-Based Storage Systems

It's taken six months, but HP has integrated 3PAR's goods and services into its own product line and is using them to modernize its cloud-building initiative.

Hewlett-Packard made a point
last Aug. 28 with its bidding
battle with Dell to win the hand of utility storage maker 3PAR. The high
bid was $2.3 billion, so it was not exactly an investment to shrug off as
simple collateral damage.
And that point was this: 3PAR is a new-age storage company with the IP we want,
no matter what. Dell, which eventually acquired Compellent a few months later
to satisfy its own storage modernization requirement, found that out firsthand.

It's taken six months, as one might imagine, but HP has integrated 3PAR's goods
and services into its own product line and is using them to modernize its
cloud-building initiative.

3PAR, though a smallish company, was well known in the industry for its
high-quality, scale-out capacity and thin-provisioning, automated storage
tiering, data deduplication, and general virtualization-ready capabilities.
The integration of 3PAR not only helps HP expand its customer base, but it also
has brought about a newly augmented storage system, the P4800 SAN (storage area network), which fits
directly into HP's blade system architecture.
There's a new backup system that's ready for prime time. Finally, HP is also
rolling out a completely new StorageWorks system dedicated to the beastly
Microsoft Exchange 2010 e-mail apparatus.
3PAR's wares were not totally optimized for HP's Unix-based operating system,
HP/UX, so the engineers had to get right to work on it. It's now a thing of the
past, Lee Johns, HP's product marketing director for StorageWorks, told eWEEK.
"We've also integrated 3PAR with our HP blade system matrix and cloud
system offerings. What this means is that you can now leverage 3PAR [with its
scale-out utility features] as part of the end-to-end provisioning capability
of those products," Johns said.
HP also has certified 3PAR's arrays with its high-end X9000 network storage
gateway-which, too, is the result of a previous acquisition, IBRIX.
"What this does is give users a scalable NAS system and [the ability] to
use 3PAR storage as the backend store but retain the characteristics of that
3PAR storage. [The X9000] doesn't consume it and hide it," Johns said.
Simplifed Management Controls for
Converged Systems
HP also has simplified its data-management controls and built them on converged
storage, server and networking platforms to provide clients with unified
management, said David Scott, senior vice president and general manager of
StorageWorks. Scott was CEO of 3PAR prior to the acquisition.
"Our clients tell us their journey to the cloud will be one of the most
critical transitions for them this decade," Scott said. "The
integration of 3PAR with Converged Infrastructure is ahead of schedule."
The P4800 G2 SAN is built inside an HP BladeSystem c7000 enclosure and
eliminates the need for external storage networking, Johns said. It uses common
management tools across server, storage and networking elements, he said.
It runs SAN/IQ 9.0 software with enhanced support for VMware vStorage API for
Array Integration. This accelerates VMware functions such as cloning by up to
95 percent while cutting the load on VMware ESX servers, Johns said.
HP's D2D4324 Backup System enables users to back up as much as 1.4 petabytes of
data with only 96 terabytes of raw disk capacity, Johns said. The new system
features StoreOnce deduplication technology home-developed in HP Labs.
Finally, HP's new E5000 Messaging System for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010
integrates servers, storage, operating system software and Exchange 2010
configuration wizards into a single, converged package.
HP said its pricing and product availability is as follows: The HP P4800 G2 SAN
starts at $148,000 and is available immediately. The HP D2D4324 Backup System
starts at $149,999 and is also available immediately. The new E5000 series is
available immediately; the E5300 with 500 mailboxes starts at $35,900, the
E5500 with 1,000 mailboxes starts at $41,400, and the E5700 with 3,000
mailboxes starts at $68,500.

Chris Preimesberger was named Editor-in-Chief of Features & Analysis at eWEEK in November 2011. Previously he served eWEEK as Senior Writer, covering a range of IT sectors that include data center systems, cloud computing, storage, virtualization, green IT, e-discovery and IT governance. His blog, Storage Station, is considered a go-to information source. Chris won a national Folio Award for magazine writing in November 2011 for a cover story on Salesforce.com and CEO-founder Marc Benioff, and he has served as a judge for the SIIA Codie Awards since 2005. In previous IT journalism, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. His diverse resume also includes: sportswriter for the Los Angeles Daily News, covering NCAA and NBA basketball, television critic for the Palo Alto Times Tribune, and Sports Information Director at Stanford University. He has served as a correspondent for The Associated Press, covering Stanford and NCAA tournament basketball, since 1983. He has covered a number of major events, including the 1984 Democratic National Convention, a Presidential press conference at the White House in 1993, the Emmy Awards (three times), two Rose Bowls, the Fiesta Bowl, several NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments, a Formula One Grand Prix auto race, a heavyweight boxing championship bout (Ali vs. Spinks, 1978), and the 1985 Super Bowl. A 1975 graduate of Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., Chris has won more than a dozen regional and national awards for his work. He and his wife, Rebecca, have four children and reside in Redwood City, Calif.Follow on Twitter: editingwhiz